The following Dad Story is an inspiring, yet cautionary tale excerpted from my book, The Modern Dad’s Dilemma: How To Stay Connected With You Kids In A Rapidly Changing World (New World Library, 2010) about the inextricable link between our physical, mental and spiritual health.
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Waking Up to What Matters
Bobby Lee Smith, 53
FAMILY: married; father of a daughter, fourteen
BORN IN: Washington, Georgia
LIVES IN: Nashville, Tennessee
OCCUPATION: CEO and president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America/Eastern Tennessee
We survived our eighteen months in New Orleans and moved back to Nashville. Soon after returning, I had my yearly physical exam, and my doctor noticed that I had elevated sugar levels. He told me to watch what I was eating and to continue exercising. I guess I had gotten caught up in the excitement of moving, had stopped exercising, and had put on some weight.
I recently found out the hard way that I’m a type 2 diabetic. In a period of three weeks, I lost about eighteen pounds and was experiencing all the symptoms and was in a state of denial.
Sometimes you have to get hit across the head with something — physically or mentally — before you wake up and focus on what really needs your attention. I see Katrina almost like my diabetes: they were both wake-up calls saying, “You need to get it right.” I’ve had to shift my priorities so that I’m taking care of myself, my health, and my family — the things that should come first anyway.
I’ve also made communication with my daughter a higher priority. When Briana was about five or six, my wife would go into her room, sit down, and spend time just allowing her to talk. At the time I just didn’t see myself doing those “motherly” or “girly” things. Now I see that by allowing Bree to share whatever she wanted, uninhibited, my wife was really setting the stage for lifelong communication.
I’ve missed a lot of these kinds of opportunities with Bree. There were those fifteen or twenty minutes on the drive to school, before she hit her teens, when she would talk about the little things with me. That changed right around twelve or thirteen. Then her talk be- came more about relationships and issues she was having with friends, things I thought she should be talking to her mother about. I should have been connecting more and listening more.
Now I’m much more focused on making sure the conversation is happening, at least to some degree, on that level.